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Curator Spotlight: Robert Sanchez on Highlighting Notable Storytelling from City Magazines Across the U.S.
Posted by 
Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Cheri Lucas Rowlands 
Related reading: Elaine Godfrey on the death of a local newspaper in Iowa and Nickolas Butler on the power of community journalism in Wisconsin.
Last week, the Black Mountain Institute announced that The Believer, the literary and culture magazine founded in 2003, will publish its final issue in spring 2022. It’s yet another blow to the world of print media, and reminded me of the other dismal headlines I’ve read this month lamenting the decline of small-town newspapers — and the ultimate cost to the communities they serve.
In a time when publications and newsrooms continue to struggle, Robert Sanchez’s tightly curated City Reads account is a beacon on Twitter. City Reads tweets the best writing from city magazines across the U.S., shining a light on local and regional stories that I might otherwise miss. Sanchez is a senior staff writer for 5280, Denver’s award-winning magazine, and has written many longreads we’ve read and enjoyed over the years. I chatted with him via email last week about the process of curation, the importance of amplifying city journalism, and his recent 5280 story on sifting through and reading the 8,500+ letters and postcards mailed to Colorado Governor Jared Polis, demanding justice in the Elijah McClain case. Read more…
‘The City Just Lied’: Remembering the 1921 Tulsa Massacre
Posted by 
Seyward Darby
Seyward Darby Greenwood Cultural Center
This Memorial Day marks the centennial of one of the worst instances of racist violence in U.S. history. On May 31, 1921, white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, launched a campaign of terror in Greenwood, a prosperous African-American neighborhood nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” The spark of the violence was ugly, and all too familiar: the lie that a white woman had been assaulted by a Black man. It was perpetuated by a local paper, the Tulsa Tribune, which published a story with the headline — or, really, the instruction — “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.”
When the dust settled, hundreds of Black residents had been killed. White rioters had looted Black businesses and destroyed Black homes. More than 30 blocks of Tulsa had been reduced to smoldering ruins. As is so often the case in a country where white power structures determine official history, the event soon slid into obscurity. For many decades, when it was recalled at all, it was referred to as a “race riot.” In truth, what happened was a massacre.
The centennial has occasioned widespread coverage of the massacre, much of it excellent. In The New Yorker, writer Victor Luckerson profiles two women who were committed to telling the full story of the violence when it seemed like no one else was:
As the centennial of the race massacre approaches, a raft of documentaries, along with a new thirty-million-dollar museum, are poised to make the story of Greenwood more widely known—and financially lucrative—than it has ever been. But the Black Tulsans who preserved the community’s history risk being forgotten, particularly the women who did the foundational heavy lifting. It’s not just Parrish—Eddie Faye Gates, an Oklahoma native and longtime Tulsa educator, continued Parrish’s work by interviewing massacre survivors more than seventy years later, recording their perspectives in books and video testimonials.
History lessons draw power from their perceived objective authority, but if you drill to the core of almost any narrative you will find a conversation between an interviewer and a subject. In Greenwood, Black women such as Parrish and Gates were the ones having those conversations. Now descendants of both women are working to insure that their legacies are recognized. “She was a Black woman in a patriarchal, racist society, and I think bringing all those elements together tells you exactly how she’s been erased,” Anneliese Bruner, a great-granddaughter of Parrish, said. “It’s convenient to use her work, but not to magnify and amplify her person.”
Luckerson himself is a dedicated chronicler of overlooked Black history: He is working on a book about Greenwood, and he publishes a newsletter, “Run It Back,” that documents his research findings.
In The New York Times Magazine, author Caleb Gayle, a Black Tulsa native, connects past to present, describing how the struggle for racial justice in his city continues. Recently, the last survivors of the 1921 massacre testified before a House subcommittee alongside Tiffany Crutcher, whose twin brother, Terence, was shot and killed in 2016 by Tulsa police:
She had started with hopes that justice would follow her brother’s killing. But it was in the dashing of those hopes that, Crutcher says, her “journey to justice” began. “We in Tulsa, Okla., aren’t going to sit by and say, ‘It is what it is,’” she said at one of the news conferences. The very narrative Crutcher has committed herself to undoing — one that says Black people are inherently bad people — is one that goes back a hundred years in her hometown, when one part of the community destroyed another part of the community, a place whose prosperity and potential belonged to, but was taken from, her ancestors.
Gayle’s article is part of a larger package about the Tulsa massacre, produced by The New York Times. Other components include an infographic revealing the extent of physical damage done during the event, and a visual feature about the excavation of victims’ gravesites.
For more on the centennial, here’s complete coverage from Tulsa World, a local newspaper.
The Can That Was Supposed to Help Save a City
Posted by 
Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath Amy Sancetta / AP Photo
Like many cities whose economies once relied on manufacturing, sections of Youngstown, Ohio, have fallen into disarray. But the city had a plan to revive Youngstown’s East Side, where steel manufacturing once ruled: Joseph Co. International would build a $20 million dollar campus to produce Chill-Can, the world’s first self-cooling beverage can, create jobs, and revive the city. In a collaboration between Youngstown’s Business Journal and ProPublica, reporter Dan O’Brien writes about this ambitious, failed saga of product development and urban renewal, and the difficult bargain cities and corporations make. Youngstown bulldozed homes to build the campus. They gave Joseph a $1.5 million grant, which included funds officials took from sewer and water projects. “This is going to revolutionize the beverage industry,” Joseph’s CEO told one publication. “There will be no other facility like it in the world.” But as O’Brien reports, the facility remains unfinished, and no jobs have been created. The problem involves the city’s approach to redevelopment, which reaches far beyond Chill-Can.
While some firms failed to deliver, officials acknowledge, Youngstown’s program has ultimately leveraged private investments of more than $755 million and has helped create a total of 2,493 jobs out of a promised 2,861, according to city records. Still, The Business Journal and ProPublica found that more than half of those jobs were created by just five companies, including a Toys R Us distribution center and Exal Corp., which manufactures aluminum cans and bottles. Exal has since reduced its workforce, while the Toys R Us warehouse closed. (That facility is now occupied by HMS Manufacturing, which employs far fewer workers than the toyseller did at its peak).
Now, Youngstown’s approach to economic development is coming under greater scrutiny as the city’s former finance director and a prominent developer prepare to face trial on public corruption charges. At the heart of the case are allegations that officials steered taxpayer funds to favored projects in exchange for bribes. The defendants have pleaded not guilty. Separately, the state auditor has alleged that officials misappropriated money from the city’s water and wastewater funds and used it to spur a number of development deals, including Chill-Can. The city is now fighting a directive from that office to repay millions of dollars, arguing, in part, that such a move would plunge Youngstown into fiscal peril.
First Ward Councilman Julius Oliver, who represents a portion of the East Side neighborhood where Chill-Can is located, describes Youngstown’s incentives system as “broken” and has pushed for more accountability against companies that have not met their promised job goals.
“We have people within our city government that could be doing more, and quite frankly, they’re not,” Oliver said. “You can’t keep using the same excuse over and over again.”
New York City Shredder
Posted by Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath Tyshawn Jones, far right, at the Adidas Skateloftnyc at Webster Hall, 2017. Johnny Nunez/WireImage
Skateboarding has been around long enough, and skate parks are numerous enough, that tons of amateurs can rip like only pros once did. It’s a whole other thing to skate with style. For The New York Times Magazine, Willy Staley profiles Tyshawn Jones. The first New Yorker to win Thrasher magazine’s Skater of the Year award, Jones represents a shift away from skateboarding’s West Coast origins, and its contentious merging with the fashion industry, which is where the money is. Besides his absolute devotion and his incredible abilities, what separates him from so many of us skaters is that he grew up in the Bronx and has used flat, crowded Manhattan as his skate park. Instead of doing the same tricks on big ramps designed for those exact tricks, he gives us something new: olleying over store signs and trash cans, sliding across handrails and flower boxes, and even doing a boardslide on the front of an earth mover on Park Avenue. Finding the spots requires talent. Imagining how to skate them, and pulling off the tricks, are whole separate talents.
As Strobeck sees it, that journey from the Bronx to Manhattan is captured symbolically in the trick that put Jones on the cover of Thrasher: an ollie over an entrance to the 6 train at the 33rd Street station. This subway entrance is a mind-boggling thing to leap over: The gap starts in an office building’s elevated plaza, and from there, you have to clear a thigh-high guardrail, then a six-foot-wide staircase plunging down into the street, with a spike-tipped fence on the other end. But the ollie itself was just a fraction of the challenge. Midtown was swarming with people whenever they went to film.
One thing Jones has that a lot of pro skaters don’t is a bunch of hardheaded friends who are willing to bring city life to a halt for him. The day he finally landed it, on his third visit, he went to the spot with 10 of his buddies, most of whom didn’t skate. They positioned themselves all around the subway entrance to help, in Strobeck’s words, ‘‘facilitate’’ — or the exact opposite, depending on your perspective. One stood in the stairwell to keep unwitting straphangers from taking a board to the skull, one stood up top to keep people from going down the stairs, some dealt with people in the plaza above, another worked as a spotter to tell Jones when the coast was clear. Even passers-by stopped to help.
To ollie over something this massive is like doing a parabolic calculus problem with your body while also attempting suicide, but it involves a set of motions Jones knows like second nature: Snap the tail and leap, dragging the board as high as you can with your front foot, tucking your knees into your body — on the Thrasher cover, Jones’s are practically touching his shoulders — then hope for the best. When Jones finally landed it, he did so with his front wheels in the street and his rear wheels up on the sidewalk, one last screw-you from New York, but he rode away. He got a message on Instagram from someone who worked in a building high above the plaza. She told him that people in the office had lined up at the windows to watch. When he landed it, the whole place erupted in cheers.
Jones makes a solid living from his sponsors and the restaurant his skate money bought him, but like most pro skaters, he would make a lot more if he was in a different sport. The skateboard industry is lucrative but has always had limitations, so Jones is wisely targeting clothing and fashion brands instead of just skateboard companies. Besides talking a lot about money, Staley’s piece is also a celebration of a sport whose athletes gets far less respect, and money, than mainstream basketball and baseball players. Hanging out with Jones, Staley makes an observation you don’t see much in skate journalism: the way skaters view other athletes.
It was the week of the N.B.A. Finals, and the two began to discuss the truly galling amount of money basketball players make. ‘‘Throwing a ball in a hoop!’’ Jones said, dismissively. ‘‘Curry got $237 million for five years.’’ It hadn’t occurred to me just how rote the work of an athlete might look to a pro skater, who must do so much more than just perform. He has to find spots, think of tricks, overcome not just his fears but also the police, Good Samaritans, cracks in the pavement, rain. And only once that chaos has been mitigated can he try to perform, to write one little line in the canon of an insular subculture. Henry joked that her son had gotten into the wrong sport entirely.
‘‘Throwing a ball in a hoop,’’ he said again. ‘‘That [expletive] is crazy!’’
Alternative Reality: ‘Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself’
Posted by 
Matthew Kassel
Matthew Kassel Wiley Bridgeman, left, of Cleveland, embraces his brother Ronnie, now known as Kwame Ajamu, as they walk from the Justice Center in Cleveland following Bridgeman's release from a life sentence for a 1975 murder. The two brothers, who were exonerated after spending decades in prison for a 1975 slaying, have sued the city of Cleveland and the detectives who investigated the case. The federal lawsuit suit, filed Thursday, July 2, 2015, names three Cleveland police detectives and a sergeant and the estates of a sergeant and three other detectives who have since died. (AP Photo/Phil Long, File)
Kyle Swenson was a young reporter at the Scene, Cleveland’s alt-weekly, when he started investigating the wrongful conviction of three black men who were imprisoned in the 1970s for a murder they didn’t commit. The men — Kwame Ajamu, Wiley Bridgeman, and Rickey Jackson, who served a combined 106 years behind bars — were exonerated in 2014, thanks in part to Swenson’s reporting, which informs his new book on the subject, Good Kids, Bad City. Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, recently returned to the pages of the Scene with a long essay, included in the list below, that looks back at the conviction and indicts the city he once called home.
Swenson’s reporting is a testament to the value of local newspapers, as Alec MacGillis, who covers politics and government for ProPublica, points out in his largely positive Times review of Good Kids, Bad City. “One can’t help wondering what life-shattering injustices might go unaddressed in the future,” he writes, “for lack of a curious reporter to take a call or open an envelope.”
MacGillis, who lives in Baltimore, knows about the contraction of the local news industry firsthand. Two years ago, Baltimore’s City Paper, founded in 1977, was shuttered by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. Weeks after its closure, a pair of enterprising editors founded the Baltimore Beat, a print alt-weekly. But the paper couldn’t support itself through advertising revenue and it closed four months later. Now, however, the Beat is back, resurrected as an online-only operation in early March. (One of the outlet’s first new feature stories is listed below.) It is being run as a non-profit, and its editors — Lisa Snowden-McCray and Brandon Soderberg — say they hope, eventually, to revive the print publication.
It’s an audacious act, starting a print publication in 2019 — and recent attempts haven’t boded well for the industry. The Knoxville Mercury, for instance — founded after the city’s longstanding alt-weekly, Metro Pulse, was shut down — closed in 2017 after just two years in print. But there is something about paper, it seems, that lends gravitas and legitimacy to a media outlet.
At the beginning of March, Indianapolis’ alt-weekly, Nuvo, announced that it would no longer be publishing a print edition, and a number of editorial employees were laid off, including Nuvo’s editor, Laura McPhee. Fortunately, the publication will live on as a website, and it will refashion itself as a member-supported non-profit, which sounds promising, despite the staff cuts.
Still, I get anxious when newspapers trade in paper for pixels. That’s not because I’m a print nostalgist; it’s because these decisions can portend disaster. I think, for example, of The Village Voice, the ur-alt-weekly, which stopped publishing its print edition in September 2017. Though the Voice continued to do good work online, it seemed to me that, without an accompanying print product, it was like a neutered beast. A year later, the Voice went out of business, thanks to the brilliant business mind of retail heir Peter Barbey, whose name I curse every time I pass a New York street corner only to find Time Out and AM New York.
It’s depressing to me that the city I live in no longer has an alternative newspaper, though I take comfort in the fact that a number of alt-weeklies around the country are still publishing good stuff, including the The Stranger, the Metro Times, Orlando Weekly, Triad City Beat, and Monterey County Weekly — all featured in this reading list.
1. “Out For Justice is Out For Change” (Lisa Snowden-McCray, March 8, 2019, Baltimore Beat)
Lisa Snowden-McCray, the editor of the newly revived Baltimore Beat, profiles an organization that advocates for the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated, who often have trouble transitioning from jail. Out for Justice is led by Nicole Hanson-Mundell, who spent a year in jail. This legislative session, in Annapolis, the organization is advocating for “two bills urging state lawmakers to support pre-release centers for women,” Snowden-McCray writes.
It’s tireless, often thankless work. But Hanson-Mundell recognizes how important it is. That’s why it’s so important that the pre-release legislation gets passed.
“How can I deny a woman who just came home and she needs housing? I can’t say ‘Miss, I don’t provide direct services, you have to go somewhere else,’” she said. “I have to tap into my resources and find out who offers housing to newly released women with children. I have to use my connections and advocate for her.”
2. “This Is the Final Thing You’ll Ever Need to Read About Howard Schultz” (Rich Smith, February 27, 2019, The Stranger)
The Stranger has no kind words for Howard Schultz, who, as you probably know, is entertaining a bid for the presidency, much to the chagrin of, well, pretty much everybody. Rich Smith describes the former Starbucks CEO as “Seattle’s most successful bean juice salesman” in this deft takedown.
He has no idea who we are as a country now, no idea how Trump became president, and so much palpable fear that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to tax his Frappuccino dividends at a reasonable rate that he’s willing to hold the country hostage unless a moderate wins the Democratic nomination.
So much for hometown pride.
3. “Defiling the temple” (Jordan Green, February 21, 2019, Triad City Beat)
Triad City Beat, which covers North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad — including the cities of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem — has a long story on Kenneth Fairbanks, a pastor and community leader who was also involved with charitable work in Nairobi. “But four criminal indictments allege that for much of the time Fairbanks was operating his ministry, he was also sexually abusing children,” including his own daughter, Jordan Green writes.
While Kenneth Fairbanks’ supporters cast him as a victim of familial treachery, his daughter, Christa, alleges that he sexually abused her for years, along with other girls, while isolating her to exert control and extorting her silence by admonishing her against ruining God’s plan for their family.
4. “Speed Trap” (Xander Peters, February 20, 2019, Orlando Weekly)
Orlando’s alt-weekly takes a sobering look at meth abuse in Florida, particularly among gay men. Xander Peters’ piece centers on a 29-year-old meth addict named Matt, who declines to give his last name. He got into the drug through Grindr, the dating app.
Matt’s genesis story isn’t uncommon in the community of men who have sex with men, or MSM. LGBTQ-focused dating apps have tried to suppress drug abuse in recent years, even banning certain terms such as “PNP” (“party and play”) and the capitalization of certain letters in members’ bios, such as the capital letter T (“Tina.”)
The depressing kicker to this story leaves little hope that Matt will ever overcome his addiction.
5. “Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself” (Kyle Swenson, February 20, 2019, Cleveland Scene)
Kyle Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, reckons with the lessons from his new book, Good Kids, Bad City, which examines the story of three black teenagers in 1970s Cleveland who were wrongfully convicted of murder, imprisoned for decades, and then exonerated.
“Good kids, bad city.” I am defensive about the title. The title implies values—the kids are good, the city is bad. I know Cleveland is a proud town but touchy, easy to injure; as I wrote, I had an invisible Clevelander in my head, belligerently asking why I had the temerity to slap the label “bad city” on the town. Was that fair? What makes a place bad, or good? I spent many an hour not writing, arguing with this invisible but touchy Clevelander, justifying the title.
Swenson more than justifies the title in this engaging and thought-provoking essay.
6. “How adult nights at Detroit’s roller rinks are keeping black skating culture alive” (Imani Mixon, February 20, 2019, Metro Times)
As a recreational activity, roller skating is a vital part of black social life in Detroit, according to Imani Mixon’s illuminating piece for Metro Times. I particularly enjoyed Mixon’s description of “Detroit-style skating,” which I knew nothing about.
Detroit-style skating is characterized by its smooth rolling motion that is heavily influenced by the Motown sound that was gaining traction around the same time that skating became a popular pastime. According to skaters who have been on the scene for decades, Detroit skaters don’t ever really stop rolling and if they do, they use the rubber toe stops on their skates, another signature marker of a Detroit skater. The basic move that every Detroit skater has to learn, whether solo or in groups, is the half-turn, which involves turning a smooth 180 degrees for a few beats then turning back in place to continue on the original skating path.
7. “Monterey Bay fishermen catch salmon as far away as Alaska. A proposed copper mine there poses a local threat” (Matt Koller, February 21, 2019, Monterey County Weekly)
Matt Koller does a good job laying out how a proposed copper mine site known as the Pebble Deposit could very well imperil the livelihoods of Monterey fisherman who spend their summers in Alaska’s Bristol Bay angling for sockeye salmon. The mine, if approved, risks contaminating the bay with discarded waste rock.
Fishermen have always accepted a certain degree of risk. But the salmon are certain. A renewable resource, they will keep returning to spawn. Yet Bristol Bay fishermen, including those from Monterey Bay, see the presence of the Pebble Mine—which seeks to extract a non-renewable resource—as a threat to their industry because it has the potential to alter these natural cycles in a fundamental way that will not balance out in the end.
The mine, Koller writes, threatens “the last great sockeye salmon run in the world” as well as “an entire way of life.”
8. “The Story of Chaney Lively” (Laura McPhee, February 21, 2019, Nuvo)
For one of its final print cover stories, Laura McPhee — until recently the editor of Nuvo — pieces together what little information there is about Chaney Lively, the first free woman of color in Indianapolis. She arrived in 1821, in what was then a frontier town, with Alexander Ralston, a Scottish surveyor “tasked with laying out the new city.” Chaney, 21, was Ralston’s housekeeper, though she had originally been his slave, most likely purchased in Louisville. Ralston died six years later, at which time Chaney inherited land.
When Chaney moved into her own home in 1827, there were less than 60 people of color—men, women, and children—living in Indianapolis out of a population of a little more than 1,000. She was the only Black female head of household in the 1830 census, and the first woman of color to own property in the city, most likely the first person of color, male or female, to do so.
In the process of excavating details about Chaney’s life, McPhee also paints a stark portrait of African-American life in Indianapolis before and after the Civil War.
***
Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Columbia Journalism Review.
The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists
Posted by 
Longreads
Longreads Dorothy Butler Gilliam at her desk in the fall of 1961 or early in 1962, soon after she arrived at The Washington Post. (©1962, Harry Naltchayan, Washington Post)
Dorothy Butler Gilliam | an excerpt from Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America | Center Street | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,927 words)
When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire country, and the African continent were all on the threshold of change. The dashing, young John F. Kennedy had just begun his presidency promising “a new frontier.” The Civil Rights Movement was kicking into high gear with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now urging young people like me to pursue professions we’d been excluded from and to excel. It was thrilling to be in the nation’s capital to begin my career as a daily newspaper journalist in the white press.
I brought a pretty placid nature to that career. When I later looked back, I surprised myself. I was so conservative politically! For example, only six years earlier, when I wrote about school integration in the student newspaper while attending Lincoln University from 1955 to 1957 (the Negro college in Missouri that provided higher education for colored students, allowing the state to keep all its other colleges and universities white), I indicated reasons we should go slowly with integration. But reporting for The Tri-State Defender in Memphis as the Civil Rights Movement dawned had begun to change me. The bus boycott victories had begun to liberate my thinking. And added confidence came from my faith, strengthened my spirit, and pushed me to do things that other people in my family didn’t do. Read more…
The City I Love Is Destroying Itself
Posted by 
Nicole Antebi
Nicole Antebi All artwork by the author
Nicole Antebi | Longreads | November 2018 | 18 minutes (4,438 words)
For the past few years I’ve been working on a topographical film titled Fred’s Rainbow Bar and Other Stages on the International Border featuring a variety of animation styles along with live-action and archival imagery to interrogate histories, memories, and imaginings of the border landscapes of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the region where I grew up. During this time I’ve also been following the incredible story of “Paso Del Sur” a watch group in El Paso who have been fighting to save Duranguito, the oldest barrio in El Paso Texas.
At any time of day or night, a group of older residents can be seen patrolling the Duranguito neighborhood in downtown El Paso, Texas, located across the river from downtown Juárez, Mexico. Historian David Dorado Romo is one of several “Paso Del Sur” figureheads who have been fighting the City of El Paso, for over a decade, to preserve the spaces Romo has long been writing about. In his 2005 book, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Romo tracked the footsteps of Mexican Revolutionary folk hero, Francisco “Pancho” Villa and other historical figures of the period throughout Duranguito and greater downtown El Paso. I visited Romo this summer in Duranguito where I interviewed him about their battle with the City and the El Paso Del Norte Group, a bi-national consortium of developers who disobeyed a court order and illegally paid people to demolish their own property. At the time of our interview the neighborhood was in a state of limbo with a section punched out of each of five buildings by orders issued by the City; giving the distinct anthropomorphic appearance of a body disemboweled and left for dead.
The day after the 2018 midterms, while awaiting edits on this piece, I got word that the City of El Paso had increased their police presence in the neighborhood and resumed fencing in properties to speed up an archaeological study, with plans to resume displacement and demolition within the next week.
* * *
NICOLE ANTEBI: Where does the name Duranguito originate from?
DAVID DORADO ROMO: The provenance of the name is both anecdotal and historical. One of the stories Toñita Morales, who lives in the adobe-looking house over there, tells me, is that she first heard it when she was a young woman living in Segundo Barrio in the late ’40s. She told me that there was a family from the State of Durango with three daughters that lived here on one of the streets and when young men would go back to visit people would say “A donde vas?” and they would respond, “Vamos con las de Duranguito.”
What I’ve seen in some of the oral history records at the University of Texas at El Paso is that it was called Barrio Durango back around the turn of the 20th century and they don’t really say why, but I get the feeling that it may have been called that because one of the streets here is Durango street. So you can find all these streets in the Anson Mills plot map of 1859, even before the railroads came here, and these were all wagon destinations. So Chihuahua and Santa Fe streets were part of the old Camino Real and Durango was also one of those destinations where you would go.
Later, in the 1990s, you had the central business association led by Tanny Berg who had plans to gentrify this place and turn it into a destination with bars and a nightlife and he started calling this whole place Union Plaza based on the Union Depot. That’s a relatively new name. And so now the city is saying it’s not called Barrio Duranguito, its called Union Plaza.
Names and terrains have always been contested. That’s part of the identity of a place and that’s also part of the struggle. We are trying to revive what the neighbors themselves call it. But in fact, if you go back to 1827, it was called Ponce de Leon Rancho and it was the first land grant on this side of the river. In 1873, when El Paso was first incorporated, Duranguito was designated the First Ward. There’s an older parcel where the Chamizal or the Segundo Barrio used to be, that, it could be said, was the first, but it was still on the Mexican side of the border at that time. So in 1873, this became the first land grant on the El Paso side. And when they first broke ground, there were a lot of adobe structures that were designed to protect themselves from the Apaches. So that was also contested terrain. And even the Apaches were themselves contesting this place. There is archaeological evidence all around of Pueblo-style sedentary communities. So really, this is part of a long, long, history of contestation. But this isn’t the kind of history the City feels like it can promote.
Read more…
To Tell the Story, These Journalists Became Part of the Story
Posted by 
Martha Pskowski
Martha Pskowski Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Martha Pskowski | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,194 words)
The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.
I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.
Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.
I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.
When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…
No Journalist Should Have to Know How to Survive in Prison
Posted by 
Alice Driver
Alice Driver Courtesy the author
Alice Driver | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,616 words)
“Welcome to the Democratic Dictatorship of Myanmar,” said a slight, young woman on the street in Yangon, Myanmar. She was referencing the number of journalists in the country who had been threatened or jailed by the theoretically democratic government. Yangon is tangled roots and the shade of 100-year-old trees; it is the sound of hundreds of wings flapping as young men feed pigeons, their feathers flashing golden in the early-morning light; it is journalists imprisoned for speaking truth to power.
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When I arrived in Yangon in January 2018, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been in prison for a little over a month. Much had changed since I had lived in the city in 2006, volunteering at an international high school with my best friend Tien, both of us living at a government-run hotel and eating Hershey’s chocolate bars out of her suitcase.
In 2015, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, swept elections, and both citizens and the international community had high hopes that she would support press freedom. At a press conference a few days before the election, Suu Kyi referenced a “communications revolution” as millions of citizens watched her via Facebook, which at that time also promised to be a beacon for democracy. Facebook arrived in Myanmar in 2011, and since that time has racked up at least 14 million users, 93% of whom accessed it on their mobile phones.
In a country where burgeoning press freedom and the appearance of Facebook coincided, media literacy has proved a challenge. During my time there in 2006, I helped students apply to colleges in the United States and Australia — basically anywhere outside of Myanmar, which at that time had a dysfunctional university system. One of the students I worked with ended up attending Berea College, my alma mater in Kentucky, which I had encouraged her to apply to since they provide funding to low-income students. Yangon University, which was once Myanmar’s most famous university, reopened for the first time in two decades in 2013. Between the lack of independent media and the lack of access to higher education during the years before the democratic opening, it didn’t surprise me that media literacy was low.
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